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Berkeley's Idealism

Just as younger children sometimes wonder whether the
refrigerator light stays on once the door is shut, so the morephilosophically minded older child may
question whetherphysical objects
continue to exist when they are not observed.George Berkeley’s answer to this question is that they do not.According to Berkeley, the physical world
exists only while it is being perceived. So what led him to this astonishing
conclusion?

Berkeley had two overriding philosophical concerns. The
first was to deal with sceptical worries about the material world.How, can we know that such a world exists?
The second was to counter what Berkeley saw as the growing tendency of the
scientistsand philosophers of his day
to push God to the periphery in their thinking about the world. Scientists were
beginning to adopt an increasingly mechanistic view of how the universe worked,
with God required, at best, merely to crank the starting handle on the great
world-machine, after which his presence was no longer required. Berkeley wanted
to bring God back to centre stage.

Scepticism

Let’s begin with the threat of scepticism. According to the
representational theory of perception embraced by many of the leading
thinkers of Berkeley’s day, we do not perceive the world directly. Rather, our
perception of the world is mediated by certain mental entities called ideas.

Suppose, for example, that you look at a tomato on the table
in front of you. When you observe the tomato, what you are immediately aware of
is not the tomato itself, but certain sensory appearances that parade, as it
were, before your mind’s eye. What you experience directly are shifting ideas
of shape, colour and so on, sliding across your internal, subjective cinema
screen. The tomato itself lies behind these sensory appearances as their cause.

Berkeley’s concern about this representational theory of
perception (which heassociates in particular with the philosopher John Locke,
although it is debatable whether Locke endorses it) is the difficulty of
knowing whether our senses are a reliable guide to external, physical reality.
If we never get to experience that reality directly, to check that there is
anything out there corresponding to our ideas, what grounds have we for
supposing such a reality exists? Rather than mediating perception of physical
reality, ideas seem to form an impenetrable veil – a barrier beyond which we
can never peek – and so threaten to cut us off from knowledge of the world.
Philosophers call this the veil-of-perception problem.

Berkeley’s solution to the veil-of-perception problem is
ingenious. Rather than supposing that physical objects lie behind our sensory
experiences, why not just suppose that they are those sensory experiences? When
you observe a tomato, the tomato is not the cause of your ideas. Rather, it
just is those ideas. As there is no particular problem explaining your
knowledge of your own ideas, so the sceptical problem generated by the
representational theory of perception is immediately solved.

If it isn’t observed, it isn’t there

Of course, while this move might indeed deal with the
veil-of perception problem, it has some very odd consequences. For a start,
ideas are mental entities. They are subjective in the same way that, say, pains
are subjective. Just as there could not be apain that no one felt, so there could not be an idea which no one
experienced.

It follows then that, if physical objects are just ideas or
collections of ideas, they too are mental entities incapable of existing
independently of being experienced.

Berkeley’s idealism has the bizarre-sounding consequence
that, if no one is experiencing that tomato, there is no tomato. Those portions
of the physical that are not observed do not exist. According to Berkeley, for
the physical world to be is to be perceived.

The rejection of materialism

Berkeley’s idealism, which simply identifies physical
objects with ideas, involves the rejection of the materialist philosophy that
says that physical objects are material substances in their own right capable
of mind-independent existence. The only genuine substances, according to
Berkeley, are mental substances – minds. Berkeley does not deny that physical
objects exist, but he maintains that they are not anything over and above the
ideas entertained by minds. There are no material substances, only mental
substances.

The role of God

Berkeley’s idealism may deal with a sceptical worry
generated by the representative theory of perception, but what of Berkeley’s
other concern – to bring God back centre stage? How does Berkeley’s idealism
achieve that?

Actually, Berkeley does not deny that physical objects
continue to exist when we are not perceiving them – that tomato remains on the
table even while none of us observes it; your kitchen continues to exist even
after you have turned off the light and gone to bed. Why? Because God
constantly observes everything. And so, while the materialist philosophers of
the day were finding less and less use for God in their thinking about the
physical universe, Berkeley gives God a central, universe-sustaining role. The
universe is kept in existence, while we do not observe it, by God’s constant
gaze.

Why the tree continues to be…

The role that Berkeley’s Idealism assigns to God is nicely
summarized in a limerick penned (at least in part) by Monsignor Ronald Knox:

There was a young man who said, ‘God

Must think it exceedingly odd

If he finds that this tree

Continues to be

When there's no one about in the Quad.’

REPLY

Dear Sir:

Your astonishment's odd:

I am always about in the Quad.

And that's why the tree

Will continue to be,

Since observed by

Yours faithfully,

GOD.

Berkeley’s master argument

We have outlined Berkeley’s extraordinary theory, but why
should we accept it? What grounds do we have for supposing that it is true? In
particular, why should we accept that physical objects cannot exist
unperceived?

Berkeley offers a number of arguments for this conclusion,
but one in particularstands out. So confident is Berkeley in this particular
argument that he is prepared to let everything rest on it. It is, for this
reason, often referred to as Berkeley’s master

argument.

Berkeley simply challenges us to try to conceive of a
physical object that exists unperceived. Try, for example, to imagine a tree
that continues to exist though no one observes it. Can you do this?

No, says Berkeley. You can’t. For in imagining the tree, you
still imagine yourself perceiving it. You imagine yourself looking at it.

Berkeley concedes that while it might seem as if we can
entertain the thought that there is a world of unperceived and unconsidered
physical objects, it turns out, on closer inspection, that we can’t.

But…

Is Berkeley’s master argument cogent? An initial worry we
might raise is that it appears to take for granted a rather imagistic view of
thought. It seems that, in Berkeley’s view, to think about something is to
entertain some sort of mental image or other sensory representation of it. When
I think of a tree, I conjure up a mental image of a tree, but then I do, after
all, imagine myself looking at it.

However, is this way of thinking about thinking correct? Not
obviously. Clearly, I can conjure up a mental image of a tree.

However, must entertaining the thought that there exists an
unperceived tree involve any such an image?

It seems not. Suppose you ask me to visualize a tree. I do
so. If you then ask me to describe my visualized tree, I will be able to do so.
For in visualizing a tree, I inevitably imagine it having various features that
I can then go on to tell you about. For example, my tree may be deciduous or
coniferous, rounded or tall, with leaves or without.

If, on the other hand, you ask me simply to suppose there is
a tree that exists unperceived, and then ask me to describe it, it may well
turn out that I don’t have in mind any particular sort of tree at all. The tree
in question need be neither deciduous

This rather tells against the assumption that thinking of
something involves conjuring up a mental image of it. But, if we can think of
something without thinking of ourselves as perceiving it in some way, doesn’t
Berkeley’s argument therefore

collapse?

Perhaps not. The reply to this objection may be that, even
if you can suppose there exists an unperceived tree, you certainly can’t
suppose that there exists one that no one thinks about. Any tree you think of
will inevitably be a tree that someone is

thinking about – namely, you.

In other words, to suppose that you can conceive of a tree
no one conceives of involves, as Berkeley himself points out, a contradiction –
the tree in question would have to be both conceived and unconceived, both
thought of and not thoughtof – which is
an impossibility.

So perhaps Berkeley can at least show that you are unable to
entertain the thought that there exists a tree that exists unconsidered by
anyone.

And…

Unfortunately, the above argument is also fallacious. We can
and should distinguish between conceiving of a particular so and so, and
conceiving that there is a so and so. I can, for example, conceive that there
was a US president who wore purple underpants without conceiving of any
particular US president (e.g. Lincoln or Reagan) wearing purple underpants.
There need be no particular person of whom I am thinking when I suppose that
there is such a person.

Armed with this distinction, we can now see why Berkeley’s argument
fails. To suppose we can conceive of something of which no one conceives
involves a contradiction. But there is no such contradiction involved in
supposing we can conceive that there is something of which no one conceives.
For that is not yet

to conceive of anything at all.

So Berkeley’s conclusion doesn’t follow. Berkeley has not shown
we can’t think that there exist things not thought of by any mind.

Illusions and hallucinations

Berkeley’s idealism faces a famous difficulty: how to
account for hallucinations and other perceptual illusions.

Suppose that, while ill and delirious, I begin to
hallucinate pink elephants dancing round my lampshade. Now the way in which we
would ordinarily explain this discrepancy between how things look and how things
really are is by saying that the

elephants exist only in my mind. There is nothing
corresponding to my experience in external, physical reality.

This explanation, of course, is unavailable to Berkeley
precisely because he rejects the suggestion that there is any such external reality.
In fact, given that Berkeley simply identifies physical objects with ideas in
the mind, and given that I am

currently having particularly vivid ideas of pink elephants,
it would seem to follow that my pink elephants are real physical objects.

Clearly, this won’t do. How, then, does Berkeley distinguish
between illusion and reality? How can he allow that my pink elephants are not
real physical objects?

He says that not all ideas are of things that are real. Our
ideas of real things, suggests Berkeley, are far more vivid than those ideas we
conjure up with our imaginations. Berkeley also maintains that our ideas of
real things are also ideas over which we have no voluntary control being put
into our minds by God. The imagination, by contrast, is free to conjure up
whatever it likes.

These suggestions do not go quite far enough in accounting for
all perceptual errors, however. After all, nightmares can be very vivid indeed
– so vivid we mistake them for reality. And they are terrifying precisely
because they are beyond our

control.

So how else might the real and the merely illusory differ? Berkeley
adds that our ideas of real things have a constancy and regularity to them –
indeed, they appear to be governed by laws (such as the laws of gravity).
Illusions and hallucinations, on

the other hand, fail to fit in with our other experiences in
a coherent way. When I hallucinate pink elephants cavorting around my
lampshade, these experiences stand out like a sore thumb so far as the texture
of the rest of my experience is concerned.

Here, suggests Berkeley, lies a further difference between those
things that are real and those that are merely illusory.

Here, too, Berkeley’s explanation of the difference between illusion
and reality seems inadequate. Surely someone might have a vivid but
unremarkable dream that fits into the rest of their experience in just the way
Berkeley describes. They might dream that they got up in the night for a glass
of water, for example, when in reality they remained in bed. Berkeley has a
hard time accounting for the possibility of this sort of

hallucination.

Few philosophers nowadays are idealists. Still, while almost
every contemporary philosopher rejects Berkeley’s conclusions, they acknowledge
that many of the points Berkeley makes in attempting to justify those
conclusions are both insightful and thought provoking.

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Comments

I must buy that particular book one day, seriously. I keep putting it off for books on science and mathematics, my other passions.

I jumped to your last paragraph in my head before I got there. When you were talking about imagining non-existent entities, I immediately thought of dreams and also images we conjure up whilst reading novels.

An extreme version of the Copenhagen version of quantum mechanics effectively gives the same version of ‘reality’ as Berkeley’s. John Wheeler speculated that the entire universe could be a giant cosmic quantum loop based on Bohr’s interpretation, which Paul Davies explores in The Goldilocks Enigma (which I know you’ve read).

What I find interesting is that it’s obvious that the universe has existed without consciousness and will continue to do so after consciousness is extinct. But, without consciousness, it’s a non-event. And without consciousness there is no reason for God to exist. If God exists then it only exists because we exist.

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